Memo to 20-year old me…

I probably wouldn’t have listened to a 40-something dude who looked like me, but every once in a while I think about the kind of advice I would give to younger Tim. Periodically I’ll share those here.

Topic 91: Your plans will change

Your current plans of law school and environmental litigation… awesome. You’ll do that. But don’t figure you’ll keep wanting to do that. This week (my time) you’ll be hosting a yoga retreat at your West Virginia cabin.* And you’ll be happy about that, because things change and plans change. Remember when you thought you wanted to double major in biology and political science? Yeah just like that…

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*Yes: yoga retreat. No, you’re not a yoga teacher. And yes, cabin in WV. You sort of live there, but it’s more nuanced than that. I know, I know… deep breaths 20 year old me… deep breaths.

World Domination Summit

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending World Domination Summit in Portland. I’ll confess something: I had never read Chris Gullibeau‘s book The $100 Startup, read his blog, or consumed anything at all related to WDS. Kimberly (the girlfriend-slash-entrepreneurial goddess who I work with and for) had heard great things about the first WDS in 2011, and we managed to nab tickets for this year’s version.

So, all I knew was that people really (really) dug the first one, the second one sold out in about 23 nanoseconds* and the whole thing has a terrible, nondescriptive name.

And it was great. I mean really great. Even though I didn’t “get” it until the end of day 1.

If I were to bumpersticker WDS, it would go something like this: a summit of people who live and work on their own terms. Lots of entreprenurial types… lots of people who work online… lots of people who travel the world… a lot of minimalists (which sounds funny)… and a lot of people who aspire to be one or more of the others.

The main speakers were interesting… I was most drawn to the stories told by Scott Harrison (founder of charity:water), particularly how he leveraged the peculiar talents of an ex-party promoter into building one of the more impressive and successful charities in the world. I also really liked Chris Brogan‘s presentation, largely perhaps because I was one of the nerds in the audience that got all of his obscure comic book references. The breakouts I chose focused on minimalism and finding freelance gigs from anywhere in the world. Day 2’s breakouts included learning more about crowdfunding and online tools for finding efficiencies in your workflow.

So, yeah… WDS is a little random… but usefully random. Maybe someone more clever would call it a holistic approach to living life on your own terms… but that would probably require a much smarter blogger. We signed up for next year, and I’m looking forward to seeing what I do between now and then.

Almost forgot the most dramatic part… as the summit was closing, Chris took the stage for a final time and told the story of how last year’s WDS lost about $30k and that this year had made a small profit (to polite applause). He then mentioned some unnamed person gave WDS $100,000 for the 2012 summit. No one, and I mean no one, would have begrudged him to invest that money into next year, or even taken that as profit. But this is the guy who wrote a book about starting a business with 100 bucks… and there were a thousand of us.

(let’s see… five carry the one… um, I was told there’s be no math in this blog?)

We all got a $100 bill. That’s putting your money where your mouth is. It’s also 1000 bets on on 1000 people to see what they can do with it. I’m planning on re-energizing Nineball Media… my hope is to have some good stories for WDS 2013…

UPDATE… Chris blogs about the investment here, and posted the video of the moment too:

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*This is a lie. It was 20 minutes.

Preparing for my ride

I’m still processing my World Domination Summit experience, so more on that sometime over the weekend I think.

Let’s talk bike tour. I’ll be doing a lot of that soon.

The current insanity plan is as follows:

  • Fly to PDX August 1st. Stay at my brother’s place in NE.
  • On 8/2, take the morning Wave bus to Tilamook, Oregon (“ride the WAVE!”) and meet up with mysterious James (mysterious because he has no social media presence and only reads your stuff. Yes, yours.)
  • Go south a few hundred miles.
  • Stop in San Francisco, because that should be enough.
  • Pack up bike and ship it back to my brother in PDX, where this bike lives.
  • Get on a plane on the 15th from SFO to DC.

Seems easy enough. There’s only like 6 bullet points in there and half are all in one spot!

I bought a used touring bike in Portland this week, mainly because I cannot justify urinating away* $200 to United airlines for the pleasure of potentially damaging my primary bike. Instead, I’ll give a great local Portland bike shop $300 for the used bike and an overhaul, support their business and have a great excuse for returning to Oregon for future rides. It seems classy and recycle-ish too. And I’m nothing if not recycle-ish.

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*Is it classier to say it that way or too clinical?

Origin Tale: why uncommonly silly?

All good superhero comics have origin tales… radioactive spider bite survivors, refugees from long exploded planets…  dudes who talk to fish and that’s their only power…

So too, all blogs (do we still call these blogs?) have origins. My favorite Supreme Court case* is Griswold v. Connecticut. It’s a seminal privacy law case that was the predecesor to Roe v. Wade. Ever hear of that one?

The crux of the case was a law that banned contraception for everyone, even married couples. Yes… married couples. The Court… and I’ll use the technical term here… smacked this law down. The ruling wasn’t unanimous, oddly enough. Some Justices thought the law wasn’t strike-downable (now an actual word). Another, Justice Potter Stewart, thought the law was inane, but nevertheless constitutional. But the best part was how he got there. Justice Stewart began his dissent with one of the all time great dismissive lines ever to grace the Supreme Court:

This is an uncommonly silly law.

So elegant. So perfectly dismissive of a perfectly stupid (and uncommonly silly) law. I love the majority ruling on principle, but this sentence remains a favorite of mine, despite its presence in the dissent with which I disagree.

So… I honor the smack talk of a lesser-known Justice by titling my blog after his words. An homage if you will.

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*{cough cough} nerd!

I have a confession to make…

I don’t tend to stick with blogging. Perhaps it’s a commitment issue… perhaps it’s a boredom issue. But honestly, I feel like I give these things a year, move on and keep the old one up like an 1880s southwestern ghost town.

I remember I published my first blog before they were called blogs. It was a Geocities page (remember them?) and I called it Dark Side of the Moon. Get it? Moon? Mooney? Super clever 90s style stuff I tell you. Then I ran out of patience for my allegedly dark, mysterious, Cobanian thoughts. And I moved on.

Then there were other blogs. Some for work. Some for play. Some serious. Others not. Then I gave up for a while, and now I’m back. But this time, I think it might stick. I’m going to start writing about things that interest me rather than things I think might interest other people.* But we’ll see.

Coming soon… why I call this “an uncommonly silly blog.”

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*Paradoxically, I hope it might interest other people. Otherwise we call these things “journals.”